Army expected to remove Pinon Canyon waiver Monday

BY PETER ROPER
The Pueblo Chieftain

Published: November 24, 2013;Last modified: May 6, 2014 04:34PM

Army generals have come and gone, but Southeastern Colorado ranchers haven’t budged and Monday they will likely win another victory in their seven-year fight to keep the Army’s Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site from getting any bigger.

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., is flying Army Assistant Secretary Katherine Hammack to the 238,000-acre training range Monday — a helicopter ride from Fort Carson to announce the Defense Department is repealing its 2007 land-aquisition waiver for the Army to try and add 418,000 more acres to the maneuver area northeast of Trinidad.

Tearing up the waiver means the Pentagon is waving a white flag, at least for now.

To the ranchers and opponents who have steer-wrestled the Army since 2006 — blocking any expansion of PCMS with congressional-funding bans, state laws and federal lawsuits — Hammack’s announcement is an important victory in what has been a grueling fight.

“I hope this means we’ve chased the wolf from the door for a good long while,” said Lon Robertson, a Kim rancher and president of the Pinon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition. “But we know that as long as (the training range) is there, we’ll need to keep look-outs posted.”

Since 2006, the 55-year-old Robertson has spent hundreds of hours organizing community meetings, logging “windshield time” going to hearings, and leading delegations of area landowners to gatherings large and small along the Front Range.

“This hasn’t been just a few voices saying no to the Army,” he said Friday. “We’ve had supporters across the state and across the nation who didn’t like what was happening here. The families that have lived out here on the land for generations, we don’t give up very easily.”

Las Animas County Commissioner Gary Hill, 63, lost his parents’ ranch when the Army created PCMS in the late 1970s, mostly through land condemnation. Those hard memories still linger in the region.

“I’ve wanted that waiver removed since the day it was granted,” Hill said. “I’d love it if this meant we could get out from under this shadow (of expansion) forever, but I don’t know if I can ever believe that.”

What is certain is the Army didn’t expect the intense battle that erupted over Pinon Canyon when officials revealed in a November 2005 meeting in Colorado Springs that they hoped to add up to 1 million acres to the training range.

Booz-Allen, the Army consultants hired to grease the process, tried to calm alarmed landowners, saying they were dealing with numerous “willing sellers” — a claim ranchers scoffed at from that day to this.

At the time. U.S. troops were fighting insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Army officials said they wanted a larger PCMS because the terrain resembled those countries. Ranchers countered that the Pentagon already had millions of acres to train on in the West.

Fort Carson leaders tried different strategies over the years. Maj. Gen. Robert Mixon was in charge when the waiver was granted in 2007. He tried to ease opposition by saying the process would take years and might not end with land acquisition. Ranchers didn’t believe that and kept hammering “This land is not for sale” signs along their fences.

Army officials tried reminding ranchers they’d initially wanted 1 million more acres, so that 418,000 more acres wasn’t unreasonable. That only convinced opponents the Army had a bigger land appetite than it admitted.

During President George W. Bush’s administration, expanding Pinon Canyon was the top Army land acquisition priority. Which is why the 2008 congressional funding ban was a major victory for ranchers.

Sponsored by Reps. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., and John Salazar, D-Colo., it prevents the Army — on a year-to-year basis— from spending any money to expand PCMS.

“I was never convinced the Army needed any more of our agricultural land because all our research showed they’d hardly used the existing Pinon Canyon in the past,” said Salazar, who is the Colorado agriculture commissioner today.

President Barack Obama’s administration started taking the pressure off expansion in 2009. It didn’t hurt that another expansion opponent, the Not 1 More Acre! group, also won a federal lawsuit against the Army that struck down the environmental studies that were done to justify more training at PCMS.

Hoping to ease the distrust between the Army and the ranch community, Army Sec. John McHugh gave Udall and Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., a letter of assurance in 2011 that said expansion was no longer in the Army’s five-year planning forecast.

Which refocused lawmakers’ attention on the 2007 waiver. The two senators along with U.S. Reps. Scott Tipton and Cory Gardner, both Colorado Republicans, began lobbying the Army to repeal the waiver as proof the expansion question was shelved.

Udall and Gardner are putting an amendment in the 2014 Defense Authorization Act that says PCMS can only be expanded in the future by an explicit vote of Congress. While ranchers want lawmakers to keep the funding ban in place, Gardner has said the amendment is stronger protection.

“I applaud the Army’s decision to remove the waiver and am pleased that assurance has been provided to the farmers, ranchers and families of Southeastern Colorado that there will be no expansion of PCMS,” Gardner said in a statement Friday.

But Robertson said the lesson of the Pinon Canyon fight, from 1980 until today, is that government promises change.

“What happens at Pinon Canyon can change with every new administration,” he said. “We know that. But we’ve demonstrated to everyone that if the government thinks it can just take land without proving a real need, they’ve got a real fight on their hands.”